Interviews, field notes and research: write by hand, find it again with Axsuro

1. One project per study. Write #StudyName on the first page of an interview, for example #CareStudy. The first #Name creates the project, every later page with the same name goes there.
2. Record the conversation if everyone agrees. With Pro, tap Record a meeting under Meetings and keep writing on paper. On the phone the recording goes on with the screen locked.
3. Take notes as usual. Keywords, quotes, observations. Anything nobody but you should see starts with private:.
4. Photograph the pages. After the conversation, take photos with the iPhone and Android app or upload them in the browser. On the page, Link a recording connects the audio.
5. Read, listen, ask. Every line Axsuro can match shows ▶ 12:34. Later, Ask answers questions across all pages of the project, with links to the pages.

In an interview you want to listen and look at the person in front of you. A laptop between you changes the conversation, a notebook hardly does. In the field, paper needs no battery and fits on any knee.

The trouble comes afterwards. The notes of twenty conversations sit in three notebooks, the quotes need typing up, and the moment someone said something important is hard to find again.

Axsuro doesn't change how you write. It reads the photographed page line by line, files it in your notebook and makes it searchable. The guide Handwriting to text explains the details.

A page from one conversation might look like this:

• Interview 07 · #CareStudy · 14.11.
• night shift: "you are alone with everything"
• handover too short, often in the corridor
• ? does this hold for the other wards
• idea: handover as its own chapter
• private: name and ward of the person
• todo: file signed consent form by Fri

Axsuro turns that into:

• a read page in the CareStudy project, dated from the page,
• thoughts from the lines without a marker, searchable across every interview,
• an open question under Thoughts → Questions and an idea under Thoughts → Ideas,
• a private line only you can see,
• a task due on Friday, waiting for your Confirm.

Every marker is explained on How markers work.

With Pro you record a conversation while you write on paper, on the phone for up to about 90 minutes, or you add an audio file. Axsuro writes down what was said and finds, for every line you wrote, the matching moment. Tap "▶ 12:34" next to a line and you hear exactly that part.

Unlike voice notes and dictation, a recording is stored: in Frankfurt, until you delete it. People you share the page with can listen to it. Tell everyone in the room before you record, and get consent the way your study requires. What your ethics board or university asks for comes first.

Long passages, such as a memory protocol after a conversation or the draft of a chapter, become a typed document. Write doc: and a title at the start. Everything below it to the end of the page is the text. The same title on a later page continues the same document.

• Word for word: Axsuro rewrites nothing. Crossed-out words are left out, inserted words go where they belong.
• The original beside it: click a paragraph and the line lights up on the photo.
• Export: PDF, Word and Markdown, on every plan. Free has 5 documents, Plus and up unlimited.

For papers and literature there is writing on a PDF (in the browser): Axsuro prints the PDF with room to write, you annotate by hand, photograph the sheets and get the original back with your notes as comments where you wrote them. Handwritten formulas are also recognised as LaTeX (read, not solved), and a hand-drawn table can be copied as real cells or downloaded as CSV.

Ask answers only from your own notes, in the language of the question, with links to the pages. It searches by words and by meaning, so a question about "handover" also finds a line that says "shift change". With Pro the recordings answer too. Free has 10 questions a month, Plus 100, Pro 500.

Anything about a person starts with private:. Only you see that line: it never goes into shares, Ask or other AI features, assistants or exports. That holds on every plan. The photo of the page is still read, otherwise Axsuro could not find the line: by Gemini in the EU, stored in Frankfurt and never used to train AI models.

To be honest: Axsuro is not a qualitative analysis tool. It doesn't code transcripts and doesn't replace software for that. It makes sure your handwritten notes, quotes and thoughts can be found again and used as text.

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• How to digitise handwritten notes and keep writing on paper
  How to digitise handwritten notes and whole notebooks, old pages and PDFs included. Then search, ask, organise and export everything you wrote.
• Why writing by hand helps you remember: what research says, and what it doesn't
  Do you remember handwritten notes better? What Mueller & Oppenheimer 2014, its replications and a 2024 meta-analysis show, and why reviewing matters most.